Mike Smith

TIVERTON — Picture this: you’ve lived in the same house for more than 50 years, and have never taken out the garbage.

Then you sealed it all in boxes and locked it in the basement, promising some day to find a better place for it.

Now, picture Canada’s nuclear industry.

Since the 1960s, nuclear power plants have generated more than two million bundles of highly radioactive used fuel. And they’re all still stored on the sites of the plants that produced them. But the pace of finding a site to store Canada’s most potent radioactive waste permanently is about to pick up. Twenty Canadian communities have said they’ll consider volunteering to host the storage site.

That list is about to close. The Nuclear Waste Management Organization, whose job it is to find and build the site, will stop taking new names on Sept. 30.

The impending cut-off is ratcheting up pressure on technocrats charged with selecting a site; on boosters who want to snare the multibillion-dollar repository for their community; on activists who harbour deep suspicions about safety; and on aboriginal leaders who say they’ve been cut out of the process.

Adding urgency is another nuclear decision hanging over Ontario: Whether to proceed with building two big new reactors at the Darlington nuclear station. Progress in finding a secure, permanent storage site for the country’s nuclear waste might give the province more comfort in continuing down a nuclear path.

Here’s a sampling of opinion from some communities willing to host the nuclear waste storage site.

The project

A fuel bundle for a Candu nuclear power reactor is about the size of a fireplace log. As of June 30, 2011, Canada had 2,273,873 used fuel bundles stored at its nuclear plants in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. In total, they’d fill about six NHL hockey rinks, stacked up as high as the boards.

The Nuclear Waste Management Organization, formed by the three electric utilities that run nuclear reactors, wants to bury the waste deep underground in caverns excavated from stable rock, where it can lie undisturbed forever.

The depth will probably depend on the site’s geology. A facility proposed to hold less-potent radioactive waste at the Bruce nuclear site near Kincardine will be 680 metres deep. By comparison, the CN Tower is 553 metres tall.

The nuclear waste agency is looking for a “willing” community to agree to take the $16- to $24-billion project. The host community itself will decide how to define “willing.” Candidate communities will have multiple opportunities to withdraw if they get cold feet, the nuclear waste agency says.

As it moves through a nine-stage process, the nuclear waste agency hopes to have narrowed the field to one or two communities by 2015, then spend until about 2020 deciding on a specific site within the chosen community.

After that, it will take three to five years to do an extensive environmental assessment of the site. The proponents will also have to satisfy the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission that their plan makes sense, and obtain a licence to construct and operate the facility.

Then, it will take six to 10 years to build. The nuclear waste agency doesn’t expect the first bundles to be stored until 2035.

How big will the site be? Current designs call for surface buildings and facilities to cover about 100 hectares (250 acres), says the nuclear waste agency’s Michael Krizanc.

“As well, there may be a need to limit activities in the immediate area surrounding the surface facilities in order to meet regulatory or other requirements.”

Underground, the excavated caverns will cover an area of about 2.5 kilometres by 1.5 kilometres. That’s 375 hectares, or 930 acres.

The contenders

Mitch Twolan, mayor of Huron-Kinloss, puts the case in moral terms: “The easiest thing to do is say, we’re not going to get involved and we’re going to pass it on to the next generation. I don’t think that’s a right thing to do.”

Entombing nuclear waste beneath the fat and fertile fields of Bruce County may seem odd. But this is energy country, too. The eight reactors of the Bruce Power nuclear plant dominate the Lake Huron shoreline, and the local economy. The plant is the region’s biggest employer.

A broad power transmission corridor runs due eastward from the power plant. And dozens of wind turbines north of Kincardine have transformed the landscape into a ballet of whirling white blades by day, and a necklace of blinking red lights by night.

Finding out whether his municipality has the conditions that would suit a deep repository makes eminent sense to Twolan — who says the township’s population grew in the last census period because of activity at the Bruce.

“If and when this would ever be built in Huron-Kinloss, it’s opening the doors for future generations to take technology where it’s going to take us,” says Twolan. “I’m comfortable with that. I believe technology will catch up.”

And as a real estate agent, he sees no threat to the cottage and tourist economy that’s also a mainstay of the region. “People are still moving in. People are still buying lakefront cottages knowing there’s a nuclear facility up there.”

Up in Elliot Lake, there’s even more enthusiasm from William Elliott, who heads the local economic development agency. He says it’s his job is to make the case for Elliot Lake to win what he sees as a contest.

“We are going to make the case that, all other things being equal on the technical side, that (our) region is best equipped to host this project.”

Saugeen Shores, which lies to the north of the Bruce nuclear plant, has also thrown its hat in the ring.

Mayor Mike Smith is more muted than Twolan, insisting his town’s interest is still preliminary:

“Let’s find out if this thing is even feasible,” says Smith.

Smith says the town can’t stand back from the project.

“I think it was the right thing to do, because our neighbours are interested in it,” says Smith. “I think we should be at the table to find out.”

The process, in any case, is a long one, he notes. It may take a decade to find the willing community, locate and evaluate a specific site, and work through the formal process to grant it a licence.

He worries about the impact of an emotional, corrosive, draining debate stretching out for a decade.

The debate, he says, has already “gobbled up a lot of air” in the community.

The locals

Standing in front of her beachfront home in Southampton, Dale Robinette knows about the divisions Smith fears.

A yellow sign protesting the proposed waste site nestles in the dune grass.

But apart from displaying the sign, Robinette says she’s pulled back from overt activism.

“It’s divided our community dreadfully,” says Robinette, whose family has owned her property for 101 years. She now lives there year-round.

“Friends of 60 years aren’t speaking to each other,” says Robinette sadly. “That’s why I’ve backed off being a real hawk about it.”

Up in Elliot Lake, contractors Stephen Martin and Marc Brunet can’t wait for the project to start.

The town has been through hard times since the last uranium mines closed in the 1990s, and they’re thirsting for more activity. Earlier this year, it was struck by the fatal collapse of the Algo Centre Mall. It’s tried to turn itself into a centre for retirement living, but that activity doesn’t match the employment generated by the mines.

“It’s a great project,” says Brunet. “It’ll bring career jobs to Elliot Lake, which we do not have ... It’ll bring a younger community, and 30-pluses.”

Elliot Lake has been identified with uranium since its founding, he shrugs, adding “We’re the uranium capital of the world.”

And his store?

“I think it’ll help my store. This thing will be a tourist attraction. I think it’s the best thing that could happen.”

Meanwhile in Saugeen Shores, a lively battle is underway as members of a citizens group dubbed save Save Our Saugeen Shores, or SOS, fights what they see as an attempt to impose the waste site on their community on the shore of the Great Lakes.

“We’re talking about something that has to be successfully containing this waste for a minimum of 100,000 years,” says Cheryl Grace, a leader of SOS. “Some of the waste we’re talking a million years. We’re talking basically forever.”

“How could we possibly say this is safe and secure that nothing will go wrong? It’s unthinkable to say we would have control over that.

“And to say that we would be siting this anywhere in the Great Lakes basin, which provides drinking water for up to 40 million people and is the world’s largest source of fresh water just seems crazy to us.”

While SOS is highly visible, it probably doesn’t represent mainstream opinion in the Bruce area.

Since the nuclear industry is the region’s biggest single employer, there’s plenty of support for at least exploring the idea of taking the repository.

U.S. residents have already peppered the website of a federal panel looking at a possible waste site with messages protesting the thought of putting the site near one of the Great Lakes.

SOS also worries that U.S. power plants might be able to force Canada to take U.S. nuclear waste in a Canadian waste site, through terms of the free-trade agreement between the countries.

John Kyles, who heads a cottage owners’ association in Port Elgin, says his members have reacted much more vociferously to the construction of a wind turbine on a CAW property in town than they have to the nuclear waste proposal.

The First Nations

The two nuclear waste proposals — for high-level and low-level waste — worry Randall Kahgee, chief of the Chippewas of the Saugeen First Nation.

“Our long-standing fear and concern and suspicion has been that the (low- level waste) project currently being proposed was really in essence just the tip of the iceberg — and, for lack of a better description, a Trojan horse — for a high-level depository.”

He is adamantly opposed to any high-level waste being stored on the lands of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation — of which his band is a member. That territory includes all of the Bruce Peninsula, plus the territory following the Lake Huron shoreline south to Goderich and stretching inland almost to Lake Simcoe.

Kahgee is also adamantly determined that his people should play an integral role in the decisions about the low- and intermediate-level waste site. He argues that his people are a nation — recognized as such by virtue of having signed formal treaties with the Crown. That should give them a seat at the table from the outset, he says, yet the current process treats aboriginal bands as lesser entities than municipal councils.

Kahgee says the high-level waste site that surrounding municipalities are looking at is completely unacceptable.

“When I look at the treaties and the sacrifices our ancestors made to protect what was theirs, where in that did it say we were going to shoulder the burden for the entire nuclear industry, forever?”

His people’s identity is tied to their land, says Kahgee; there is no adequate compensation possible should an unforeseen accident leave it contaminated.

The Saugeen nations have filed a hefty legal brief with the federal panel looking at the proposed low and intermediate level waste site at the Bruce nuclear plant.

In painstaking legal terms, it ties the low and intermediate level site tightly together with the high level waste site, saying an inquiry into one project must also take into account the possibility of the other.

Any review of the low-level site that fails to look at a possible high-level site as well will be “fatally compromised,” the brief argues.